


Needle Nick (It Goes Both Ways)

by parke



Category: No Fandom
Genre: Drug Use, Eating Disorder, Gen, Heroin, Original Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-12
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-18 17:22:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29372277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/parke/pseuds/parke
Summary: Just needed a place to post my short story for easy access.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4





	1. Chapter 1

Jay’s tugging at my cheeks, and I don’t know whether to be grateful or pissed. She’s tugging so hard I can barely see, but her arms are also propping me up. Kind of. 

My back’s pressed to her chest, and her arms are draped over my shoulders. They’re snapped up at the elbows, and her ice cold hands cradle my face round the edges. 

She’s talking, and I’m tuning in and out. She’s gone over the same lecture a dozen times before, and with the seesaw I’m teetering on, I’ve got to prioritize. Everything’s blurry because of the way Jay’s pulling at my cheeks, though I’m seeing black spots too. 

Beyond that, I can only stand because my back’s pressed to Jay’s chest. I can manage for now, though not without a crutch, and I don’t want Jay to be that for me. The moment I really come to depend on her, that’s the moment I’ll start collecting debt. 

Anyway, Jay’s currently droning on and on about how it’s too hot for me to wear those jeans, and she’s going on about how I need to get a whole new wardrobe while I’m at it. She tells me to quit holding onto the body I once had, and my insistence on saving what’s gone has got me neglecting the things I can control. 

Like I said, none of this is new. It’s not getting either of us anywhere, and she’s just wasting our time. The clock is ticking, and mentally, I’m counting the seconds, waiting for her to take a breath, waiting to nestle in my commentary. 

The moment comes soon enough, and so I’m telling her okay, point made, whatever. That’s all I say. And if I could go back and alter the events of what would come, that’s one thing I wouldn’t change. 

You’ve got to understand that, with Jay, I have to be brief. I’ve always got to streamline what I want to say. Jay, she’s got the attention span of a goldfish, and so I don’t have much to work with. 

“I know you understand.”

There’s a trail in her voice, and that means she’s getting ready to say more. But before she does, she lets go of my face, and I fall towards the sink counter. 

The sink couldn’t be more than a foot away, though when I throw out my hands to catch myself, I feel like I’ve caught the ledge of a cliff instead of a Formica countertop.

Now, my whole body’s trembling, and my mom’s just standing in the back, shaking her head, crossing her arms. The sleeves of her sundress bunch around her elbows, and she’s slow to pull them back over.

“Getting smart with me isn’t going to get you anywhere.”

“I have shit to do.”

“I’d love to know how you’re going to get anything done in that state.”

She comes to me then, and I’m wishing I could bat her away or tell her to fuck off. I’m wishing I can stand on my own and prance out of here with my head held high. 

But I can’t do any of those things, and I know I’m the reason for that. 

Believe me, I know I’m to blame.

What I do then is, I let Jay take me by the waist. She ushers me to the toilet seat, and when she sets me down, she draws a pair of tweezers from her pocket.

“We haven’t done this in a while.”

There are two things I can do here: either I can sit and take this as Jay plucks my brows back to oblivion, castrating what character there’d been in my face—-or I can yelp and flinch till she gives up.

I’ve been through this enough times to where the second option may not be believable anymore, but my stomach’s gnawing, and everything’s getting blurry again. 

Jay kneels between my knees, raises the tweezers to my brows, and there’s no preamble, no ‘are you ready’. She just starts plucking. 

I force myself to hold out for a bit, ride the too-familiar wave of pain till it grounds me. I’m not keen on waiting a while, so when the first bit of energy returns, I use it to flinch away. 

And then Jay flinches back too. And then the sleeves of her sundress fall around her elbows. From the looks of Jay’s forearms, I could take a marker and play connect the dots if I wanted to. I don’t realize I’m staring till she raises her forearms over my lap.

She looks up to me, open and unwavering and she says, “Touch them.”

Her arms in my lap, hands splayed open, palms facing the ceiling. She’s a shift away from going into prayer position, and I’m a shift away from falling off the damn seat. 

I wonder if this is what preachers feel like at confession. Someone comes through the door and they tell you all the shit they’ve done, all the shit they’re still doing, and you’ve got to sit there and listen to it. Sit there and accept them for who they are.

I look down at Jay’s forearms, the forearms with the hands splayed wide open and the palms facing the ceiling, and now I’m playing connect the dots with her track marks. There’s nothing else to do with them. I can take the view for what it is, but if I do that, it means I’ve got to take in everything else. 

“Who are you?”

I’m the airhead protagonist in a horror film that’s just received a knock at the door. I’m walking through the house with all the lights off, and now my hand’s hovering right over the doorknob. 

Jay cocks her head to the side. I only see the way her split ends descend to the base of her ribs. 

“Who do you think I am?”

My hand falls from the doorknob.

“No. We’re not going to play this game. We’re not going to start asking questions we know the answer to.”

“Who said you’re calling the shots?”

I try backing away, but the head of the toilet is right behind me----and by the time I’m grabbing at the rack set above it to help me off the seat, Jay clutches my thighs and forces me down. The rack bangs against the wall, and a flurry of makeup tubes and hair products roll off the shelves, raining over and around the both of us. 

A packet of lotion splatters where Jay’d been a moment ago-----and now she’s in my lap, wrenching my head to the side and snarling, 

“Look at me when I’m talking to you.”

“Let go of me.”

“Laurie,”

She says my name like it’s a curse, something used to scold me and shame me into understanding that she’s got it hard, that I should look at things from her perspective. She definitely wants an apology, and I’m thinking she might want that worse than the prick of a needle. 

And what’s got me going is she’s not going to fucking get that. 

“You’re using. You’re using and I don’t know, I don’t want to live with a fucking junkie, people like you, they-----”

“ ‘People like you’?” 

Her lips are to my ear, and the gloss is sticking to my lobe. 

“People like me clean restaurant tables and educate kids and make the backbone of society. That’s why we use. This, it’s stressful.”

“But we’re all addicts, and just because you don’t snort or shoot doesn’t make you any better than me.”

“I think it does.”

Jay pulls back, and her brows are raised high. I’m not used to seeing them that far up on her forehead. Usually, they’re down low, and most times, they’re drawn together as well. Now, however, since her face isn’t scrunched up, she just looks stretched out.

“I think—-no, I know I’ll always be better than you. And do you want to know why?”

“I don’t care.”

She says this in a light, decadent way, as if there’s no weight behind the words, as if she’s simply responding to a question about where she wants to go for dinner. If her hands weren’t smothering my face, I’m willing to bet she would’ve shrugged too. 

“I don’t care, and that’s because I’m paying the bills every month and putting clothes on your back and keeping your belly fuller than it needs to be. I’m doing everything I need to be, and I’m still maintaining my habit.”

“You can point your fingers all you want and call me a junkie or a lowlife or whatever you think I am, but I’m not the one with the failing grades. I’m not the one who’s fucked up the one job she has.”

“You wouldn’t----you don’t know anything. I’ll graduate. I don’t need good grades anymore.”

“That’s not what your counselor’s telling me.”

“Stop. Please. Just stop.”

There’s a lot I want to say, but it’s incomprehensible. I can’t slow down and take the time to interpret each one of my thoughts. Jay’s telling me too much, and she’s too close, and her breath is choking me. At this point, the black spots crop up more frequently, but now they’re mixing with the polka-dot print of Jay’s dress, and I’m wondering if any of it’s real. If my dizziness is really there. 

“Laurie, I can help you if you let me.”

“I don’t need your help.”

“There’s a reason you’re living under my roof. You’re still too young to know what’s good for you.”

Maybe I could respond, and maybe I could agree, say yes, I know I’m young, but young people can be right about certain things, and I think my judgement holds precedence over a woman who finds solace in stabbing herself till she looks like a slice of swiss cheese.

I could say all this and more. So I decide to hand her the reins. 

I let her carry on, partially because I can hear the trail in her voice, mostly because I’m too exhausted to fight back. 

“I know what’s going on, Laurie.”

“I can hear the way you rummage through the fridge in the middle of the night, and I’ve heard the way you run to the toilet to throw it all up.”

I’m tired. Too tired. The fire’s gone, the ash is here, I don’t want to think about this, I don’t want it thrusted in my face. I don’t want to be reminded of how my attempts at starvation have fucked me over, because lately, I’ve gotten fatter, and all the perks have remained consistent. 

The worst, I think, is the fog. 

A couple years back, I learned in science class that the brain relies on carbs to function. They’re an absolute necessity. Without them, you’ll experience loads of mental fog, and it’ll be hard to think. 

For me, that fog, that static, it’s never disappeared. Ever since I’ve started starving myself, I’ve been a shitty portable radio, petering in and out of reality, catching onto shards but not being able to make sense of what I glean. I can’t remember a time where I looked at those shards and thought them enough--------I’ve always had to ask others to repeat what they said, never once, sometimes twice, usually multiple times. But by then, the bits I’d gleaned to start would fade out, and so I’ve come to accept I’ll always miss the most important parts. 

My brain, like Jay’s goldfish attention span, has a hard limit. It’s also got an expiration date that’s long overdue, and I’m having to make do with the rot. 

So I’m not questioning how Jay knows this. I’m just wondering why she hasn’t done anything about it. 

“Can I ask you something, Mom?”

She pulls her mouth away from my ear, and she looks me in the eye. Her lip gloss is puckered up in a bunch of tiny peaks, and she’s breathing fast. 

I wait one, two, three seconds. And I’m going to take her silence as a good sign. A green light. 

“Mom, I want you to tell me how often you’ve shot up while I’ve purged.”

Personally, I’ve lost count how many times I’ve heard the creak of a floorboard or the padding of feet while I’ve had my head in the toilet. You know, when you’re bending down that far, and you're on your fifth or sixth or ninth round, you can’t really trust your senses. I mean, beyond the fact that you're practically nose-deep in your own vomit, you just know not to trust yourself. 

“I don’t think it matters how many times I’ve done that. This, the reason I’m telling you about all this… I just think it can help you. You’ve been gaining way too much weight, and it’s just so sad to see you throw your life away like that.”

“So you think it’s more upsetting that I’m gaining weight than it is to get high to the sounds of me puking. You really think that’s what’s upsetting?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

Jay’s face is going red. She’s shaking more, and her oversized bangles jingle at the elbows.

“Fuck you. Get the fuck off me.”

I’m taking her hands, still ice cold and still plastered to my cheeks, and I yank them off, and then I take her by her heroin waist and shove her to the floor. 

She falls on her butt, and she lets out a cry, but she seems more shocked than hurt. Hurting her isn’t really the goal though. 

I don’t bother checking up on her after that. Instead, I’m starting towards the bathroom door, the door that’s maybe four feet away, and I’ve taken two steps when I collapse in front of it. My legs fold under me, and my palms hit the tile in a way where the impact races up my arms. 

And Jay, shrouded in the clearance sundress that fits more like a hospital johnny, Jay is quick to slip beside me. And somehow, she’s got her purse too.

Then she’s going through it. I can hear the crinkle of plastic and the lower clicks of glass. 

I’m the protagonist in a horror movie, and now the killer is coming at me with her knife held high. When Jay speaks, her voice sounds low and rough.

“What do you have left? What does a bitch who flunks out of high school do with herself to make money?”

She’s digging, digging, digging, and she’s rattling on, telling me that education is a woman’s golden ticket to an actual life, and that without it, I need to be-----

“---a whore. There’s nowhere else for you to go. Nothing else for you to be.”

She takes out the syringe, and she takes out a vial, and she’s unbuckling the belt round my jeans. 

“I knew this was coming. No offense, but you weren’t ever going anywhere.”

“That’s why I tried to keep you pretty. Shaved your legs, did your brows, painted your nails.”

“I did what I could, Laurie. I really, really did.”

Jay takes me by the chin again, and she makes me look at her. 

All I can focus on are her piss-yellow horse teeth. Those teeth have only been getting yellower, and they’ve always stuck out from her thin little lips no matter how tight she’d try shutting her mouth. 

I’m a shitty portable radio, petering in and out of reality, and I don’t know how I haven’t noticed the way her teeth have gone to absolute hell. I don’t know how I haven’t connected the dots-----not the ones on her forearm-----but all the others. 

The deep wrinkles. 

The sunken eyes. 

The sallow, papery skin. 

And now my belt’s tied tight round Jay’s bicep, and she’s sticking the needle through the vial, then she’s taking it and injecting it straight through tar black veins. 

You know, I’m not sure what it is about seeing the way the needle goes in, spilling the contents inside nice and slow and languid. I’m not sure what it is about seeing how Jay sags against the wall and closes her eyes. I’m not sure what it is about seeing how her breathing slows, and how the fabric of her dress slides up and down, like daisy petals drifting through a breeze, plucked by those dealing with unrequited love, playing games to preserve their peace of mind. 

I don’t know what it is about all this------and looking back, I still don’t have answers. 

All I realize is that, in this moment, I’m having an epiphany. Call it a second hand high. 

I’m a shitty portable radio, but I’m also the protagonist in a horror movie, and now the killer’s turned the knife on her own heart, and then she’s spurting out blood like a broken sprinkler. I’m the protagonist getting doused in the blood of the woman who’d wanted to kill me seconds ago-------and what I’m doing is, I’m dropping my bat, fetching a knife, and stabbing myself alongside her.

So here we are, with me crawling towards Jay’s faux Prada purse because I’m too weak to get up, and the floor’s swaying under me, and I’m thinking that she’s a genius, and that she’s right as rain, because I’ve lost everything. I only hoped no one would notice. 

But I was stupid to think so-----and I’d be stupid to turn down the opportunity to achieve what I want.

I don’t want to be skinny though. That’s not what this is about, and you need to understand this. 

Being skinny only means people will pay attention to me. Slow down in the halls, set a hand on my shoulder, ask if I’m eating enough, ask if I’m okay. They’ll tell me they’re just a text or call away, and even though they’d never follow through, I can bask in the idea of it. 

With my hand in Jay’s purse, I start to sift through the mounds of garbage, and I make two prayers. I wish I could tell you what they were. 


	2. Alternate Abridged Version

Mom’s tugging at my cheeks, and I don’t know whether to be grateful or pissed. She’s tugging so hard I can barely see, but her arms are also propping me up. Kind of. 

My back’s pressed to her chest, and her arms are draped over my shoulders. They’re snapped up at the elbows, and her ice cold hands cradle my face round the edges. 

She’s talking, and I’m tuning in and out. She’s gone over the same lecture a dozen times before, and with the seesaw I’m teetering on, I’ve got to prioritize. I’ve got to arrange my concerns and compartmentalize my feelings. Not eating for 20 hours forces you to do that sort of thing. 

My current obstacle, Mom’s insistence on dolling me up without reason. My current solution, taking the tweezers off the counter and using that to gouge her eyes out. 

We both know the likelihood of that happening. 

Anyway, at some point, after she’s finished her tangent, Mom ushers me to the toilet. Then she pulls out those goddamn tweezers. 

Today’s eyebrow plucking. Tomorrow’s leg shaving. The next day, I’m not sure. I’ve never bothered to learn my own grooming schedule. I suppose you could say there’s an irony to all this, to a girl who tries starving herself down to an ideal whilst neglecting every other aspect of her physical appearance. I won’t pretend this is something I haven’t pondered a thousand times before.

Now, Mom kneels between my knees, raises the tweezers to my brows, and there’s no preamble, no ‘are you ready’. She just starts plucking. 

I force myself to hold out for a bit, ride the too-familiar wave of pain till it grounds me. I’m not keen on waiting a while, so when the first bit of energy returns, I use it to flinch away. 

Let me clarify by saying I don’t want to have to do this. I don’t want to fake pain in order to rush out to the kitchen and shove something down my throat. I don’t want to submit to physical needs, and I never have.

But when Mom flinches back in response to my own movement, I can’t say food’s still my primary concern. 

The sleeves of her sundress have bunched around her elbows, and from the look of her forearms, I could take a marker and play connect the dots if I wanted to. I don’t realize I’m staring till she raises her arms over my lap.

She looks up to me then, open and unwavering and she says, “Touch them.”

Her arms in my lap, hands splayed open, palms facing the ceiling. She’s a shift away from going into prayer position, and I’m a shift away from falling off the damn seat. 

I wonder if this is what preachers feel like at confession. Someone comes through the door and they tell you all the shit they’ve done, all the shit they’re still doing, and you’ve got to sit there and listen to it. Sit there and accept them for who they are.

I look down at Mom’s forearms, the forearms with the hands splayed wide open and the palms facing the ceiling, and now I’m playing connect the dots with her track marks. There’s nothing else to do with them. I can take the view for what it is, but if I do that, it means I’ve got to take in everything else. 

“Who are you?”

I’m the airhead protagonist in a horror film that’s just received a knock at the door. I’m walking through the house with all the lights off, and now my hand’s hovering right over the doorknob. 

Mom cocks her head to the side. I only see the way her split ends descend to the base of her ribs. 

“Who do you think I am?”

“No. We’re not going to play this game. We’re not going to start asking questions we know the answer to.”

“Who said you’re calling the shots?”

I try backing away, but the head of the toilet is right behind me----and by the time I’m grabbing at the rack set above it to help me off the seat, Mom clutches my thighs and forces me down. The rack bangs against the wall, and a flurry of makeup tubes and hair products roll off the shelves, raining over and around the both of us. 

A packet of lotion splatters where Mom’d been a moment ago-----and now she’s in my lap, wrenching my head to the side and snarling, “Look at me when I’m talking to you.”

“Let go of me.”

“Laurie,”

She says my name like it’s a curse, something used to scold me and shame me into understanding that she’s got it hard, that I should look at things from her perspective. She definitely wants an apology, and I’m thinking she might want that worse than the prick of a needle. 

And what’s got me going is she’s not going to fucking get that. 

“You’re using. You’re using and I don’t know, I don’t want to live with a fucking junkie, people like you, they-----”

“ ‘People like you’?” 

Her lips are to my ear, and the gloss is sticking to my lobe. 

“People like me clean restaurant tables and educate kids and make the backbone of society. That’s why we use. This, it’s stressful.”

“But we’re all addicts, and just because you don’t snort or shoot doesn’t make you any better than me.”

“I think it does.”

Mom pulls back, and her brows are raised high. I’m not used to seeing them that far up on her forehead. Usually, they’re down low, and most times, they’re drawn together as well. Now, however, since her face isn’t scrunched up, she just looks stretched out.

“I think—-no, I know I’ll always be better than you. And do you want to know why?”

“I don’t care.”

She says this in a light, decadent way, as if there’s no weight behind the words, as if she’s simply responding to a question about where she wants to go for dinner. If her hands weren’t smothering my face, I’m willing to bet she would’ve shrugged too. 

“I don’t care, and that’s because I’m paying the bills every month and putting clothes on your back and keeping your belly fuller than it needs to be. I’m doing everything I need to be, and I’m still maintaining my habit.”

“You can point your fingers all you want and call me a junkie or a lowlife or whatever you think I am, but I’m not the one with the failing grades. I’m not the one who’s fucked up the one job she has.”

“You wouldn’t----you don’t know anything. I’ll graduate. I don’t need good grades anymore.”

“That’s not what your counselor’s telling me.”

“Stop. Please. Just stop.”

There’s a lot I want to say, but it’s incomprehensible. I can’t slow down and take the time to interpret each one of my thoughts. Mom’s telling me too much, and she’s too close, and her breath is choking me. At this point, the black spots crop up more frequently, but now they’re mixing with the polka-dot print of Mom’s dress, and I’m wondering if any of it’s real. If my dizziness is really there. 

“Laurie, I can help you if you let me.”

“I don’t need your help.”

“There’s a reason you’re living under my roof. You’re still too young to know what’s good for you.”

Maybe I could respond, and maybe I could agree, say yes, I know I’m young, but young people can be right about certain things, and I think my judgement holds precedence over a woman who finds solace in stabbing herself till she looks like a slice of swiss cheese.

I could say all this and more. So I hand her the reins. 

I let her carry on, partially because I can hear the trail in her voice, mostly because I’m too exhausted to fight back. 

“I know what’s going on, Laurie.”

“I can hear the way you rummage through the fridge in the middle of the night, and I’ve heard the way you run to the toilet to throw it all up.”

I’m tired. Too tired. The fire’s gone, the ash is here, I don’t want to think about this, I don’t want it thrusted in my face. I don’t want to be reminded of how my attempts at starvation have fucked me over, because most of the damage hasn’t faded. I’ve gotten fatter, though loads of perks have remained consistent. 

The worst, I think, is the fog. 

A couple years back, I learned in science class that the brain relies on carbs to function. They’re an absolute necessity. Without them, you’ll experience loads of mental fog, and it’ll be hard to think. 

For me, that fog, that static, it’s never disappeared. Ever since I’ve started starving myself, I’ve been a shitty portable radio, petering in and out of reality, catching onto shards but not being able to make sense of what I glean. I can’t remember a time where I looked at those shards and thought them enough--------I’ve always had to ask others to repeat what they said, never once, sometimes twice, usually multiple times. But by then, the bits I’d gleaned to start would fade out, and so I’ve come to accept I’ll always miss the most important parts. 

My brain, like Mom’s goldfish attention span, has a hard limit. It’s also got an expiration date that’s long overdue, and I’m having to make do with the rot. 

So I’m not questioning how Mom knows this. I’m just wondering why she hasn’t done anything about it. 

“Can I ask you something, Mom?”

She pulls her mouth away from my ear, and she looks me in the eye. Her lip gloss is puckered up in a bunch of tiny peaks, and she’s breathing fast. 

I wait one, two, three seconds. And I’m going to take her silence as a good sign. A green light. 

“Mom, I want you to tell me how often you’ve shot up while I’ve purged.”

Personally, I’ve lost count how many times I’ve heard the creak of a floorboard or the padding of feet while I’ve had my head in the toilet. You know, when you’re bending down that far, and you're on your fifth or sixth or ninth round, you can’t really trust your senses. I mean, beyond the fact that you're practically nose-deep in your own vomit, you just know not to trust yourself. 

“I don’t think it matters how many times I’ve done that. This, the reason I’m telling you about all this… I just think it can help you. You’ve been gaining way too much weight, and it’s just so sad to see you throw your life away like that.”

“So you think it’s more upsetting that I’m gaining weight than it is to get high to the sounds of me puking. You really think that’s what’s upsetting?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

Mom’s face is going red. She’s trembling more, and her oversized bangles jingle at the elbows.

“Fuck you. Get the fuck off me.”

I’m taking her hands, still ice cold and still plastered to my cheeks, and I yank them off, and then I take her by her heroin waist and shove her to the floor. 

She falls on her butt, and she lets out a cry, but she seems more shocked than hurt. Hurting her isn’t really the goal though. 

I don’t bother checking up on her after that. Instead, I’m starting towards the bathroom door, the door that’s maybe four feet away, and I’ve taken two steps when I collapse in front of it. My legs fold under me, and my palms hit the tile in a way where the impact races up my arms. 

And Mom, shrouded in the clearance sundress that fits more like a hospital johnny, Mom is quick to slip beside me. And somehow, she’s got her purse too.

Then she’s going through it. I can hear the crinkle of plastic and the lower clicks of glass. 

I’m the protagonist in a horror movie, and now the killer is coming at me with her knife held high. When Mom speaks, her voice sounds low and rough. 

“What do you have left? What does a bitch who flunks out of high school do with herself to make money?”

She’s digging, digging, digging, and she’s rattling on, telling me that education is a woman’s golden ticket to an actual life, and that without it, I need to be-----

“---a whore. There’s nowhere else for you to go. Nothing else for you to be.”

She takes out the syringe, and she takes out a vial, and she’s unbuckling the belt round my jeans. 

“I knew this was coming. No offense, but you weren’t ever going anywhere.”

“That’s why I tried to keep you pretty. Shaved your legs, did your brows, painted your nails.”

“I did what I could, Laurie. I really, really did.”

Mom takes me by the chin again, and she makes me look at her. 

I’m a shitty portable radio, petering in and out of reality, and I don’t know how I haven’t noticed the way her teeth have gone to absolute hell. I don’t know how I haven’t connected the dots-----not the ones on her forearm-----but all the others. 

The deep wrinkles. 

The sunken eyes. 

The sallow, papery skin. 

And now my belt’s tied tight round Mom’s bicep, and she’s sticking the needle through the vial, then she’s taking it and injecting it straight through tar black veins. 

You know, I’m not sure what it is about seeing the way the needle goes in, spilling the contents inside nice and slow and languid. I’m not sure what it is about seeing how Mom sags against the wall and closes her eyes. I’m not sure what it is about seeing how her breathing slows, and how the fabric of her dress slides up and down, like daisy petals drifting through a breeze, plucked by those dealing with unrequited love, playing games to preserve their peace of mind. 

I don’t know what it is about all this------and looking back, I still don’t have answers. 

All I realize is that, in this moment, I’m having an epiphany. Call it a second hand high. 

I’m a shitty portable radio, but I’m also the protagonist in a horror movie, and now the killer’s turned the knife on her own heart, and then she’s spurting out blood like a broken sprinkler. I’m the protagonist getting doused in the blood of the woman who’d wanted to kill me seconds ago-------and what I’m doing is, I’m dropping my bat, fetching a knife, and stabbing myself alongside her.

So here we are, with me crawling towards Mom’s faux Prada purse because I’m too weak to get up, and the floor’s swaying under me, and I’m thinking that she’s a genius, and that she’s right as rain, because I’ve lost everything. I only hoped no one would notice. 

But I was stupid to think so-----and I’d be stupid to turn down the opportunity to achieve what I want.

I don’t want to be skinny though. That’s not what this is about, and you need to understand this. 

Being skinny only means people will pay attention to me. Slow down in the halls, set a hand on my shoulder, ask if I’m eating enough, ask if I’m okay. They’ll tell me they’re just a text or call away, and even though they’d never follow through, I can bask in the idea of it. 

With my hand in Mom’s purse, I start to sift through the mounds of garbage, and I make two prayers. I wish I could tell you what they were. 

  
  



End file.
